


Scan

by Diaphenia



Series: marks of love [2]
Category: Nothing Much to Do
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Companion Piece, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 05:39:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2376824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diaphenia/pseuds/Diaphenia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re getting almost adequate,” Bea says to Ben after the game. “By the time’s school’s over you might be good enough to be on the team.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scan

**Author's Note:**

> This is the companion piece to [Skin](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2283171), which is from Bea's perspective. Each story works as a stand-alone, but are meant to intertwine.
> 
> With much love to Blithers.

_Beatrice_.

His wrist says _Beatrice_.

There’s only one girl he knows with a weirdly old-fashioned name like that.

He very casually pulls out his phone and looks her up on facebook. Her page is on lockdown, and she unfriended him ages ago, so all he can see is her profile picture, a picture of her goofing off with some girl he doesn’t know.

Her wrist isn’t in the picture.

He wonders.

***

Ben can hear Mr. Donaldson down the hall, talking to Pedro about the family legacy. He can see his laptop, casually left open on the bed Ben’s sitting on.

He likes to think he’s the sort of person who would never steal his friend’s laptop to creep on someone on facebook, but he’s not, and it’s better to admit to that than pretend otherwise.

Beatrice Duke pops right up, only she’s friends with Pedro, so Ben can see everything.

She hadn’t posted a picture on her sweet sixteen, wrist out, the way most people do. Not Ben, of course, because he’s sworn off relationships, what with how everyone loses their mind once their name appears. Every other day he hears _I’m going to find my soulmate_ , like any of that’s a good idea. They’re all children, practically, still subject to curfews and legally mandated alcohol restrictions.

He spends way too long looking through her pictures, not that it’s a chore. She’s gotten really pretty since he last checked, all rosy cheeks and a slim figure. He looks through months of photos before he finds one. She’s wearing a football uniform, half covered in mud, but she’s got a huge grin on her face and his name on her wrist.

Well, technically, he can only see _dick_ but, unless her soulmate’s an actual penis, it’s probably his name.

“What, you lookin’ at porn?” Pedro asks, and Ben slams the laptop shut before he realizes he didn’t close the window first. But his friend is looking at him, so he’s tries to open it again, as casually as possible.

Pedro launches himself onto the bed, crashing right into Ben, swerving to grab the computer. “No, better than porn!” he laughs. “You were looking at Bea.”

“It was an accident.”

“Sure it was. You want to look up your soulmate.” Pedro smirks.

He gasps. “I would _never_ do something so disgusting as be curious about my soulmate.”

Pedro rolls his eyes before grabbing the tv remote. “Glad you’ve managed to entirely subvert human nature like that.”

***

That night, a dream about Kate Upton morphs into a dream about Beatrice, wearing a bikini and stroking his ego. He wakes up feeling mildly guilty about it, this girl he's tied to that he might never see again.

After that, Beatrice starts popping up in his dirty dreams with excessive regularity. She’s one of a cast of hundreds, but she’s there just the same, sometimes wearing her football uniform, sometimes wearing nothing at all.

***

When he sees her on the football pitch, out of the blue, he almost thinks it’s another dirty dream, but he looks at her under the bright afternoon sun and he swears he feels his wrist tingle.

He decides to talk to her.

***

“You really should pay more attention to the game, and less time on stupid shit,” Bea says after their game. This is the third weekend in a row she’s come to see them, even though Hero isn’t there. Probably Hero’s off reading to the blind or saving puppies or something.

“I didn’t realize you were stupid shit,” he says.

“If you’re too busy staring at me to play that truly is pathetic because I didn’t look at you once.”

“Clearly you did.”

“Only to check out your technique. You’re sloppy with your planter foot. No wonder you can’t kick properly.”

“Oh yeah? I’d like to see you try.”

She doesn’t even look back at him, jogging over to Claud and taking his ball. Claud, and Pedro too, follow her back. “You always have your foot facing the direction you want it to go.” She kicks it gently over to him.

He kicks it back to her, harder. That it’s a little to the right of her is immaterial.

She runs over to it, and kicks it back to him, hard.

“Bea’s way better at this,” Pedro says.

“Maybe she’s got the fundamentals, but none of the style,” Ben answers. He turns his foot a little, kicking it straight towards her. She blocks it easily, then kicks it right over his shoulder.

“Maybe we should put her on the team,” Claud says. “Replace you.”

“Well, if Messina had a girl’s team, maybe I’d be playing right now.” Bea smiles that half-sarcastic smile of hers. “Aren’t you going to get the ball?” She walks off before Ben can formulate a response.

“She’s pretty much the coolest,” Pedro says.

Ben shrugs. Sure, she’s impressive, but such a bitch.

Claud taps him on the shoulder. “Seriously, though, can you grab the ball?”

***

“She said she never wanted to do anything so cliche as to fall in love with her soulmate,” Pedro says.

“I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good role model for her,” Leo says. “Out of university and I’ve still not even looked for _Audrey_.”

Claud nods vigorously. “Hero says Bea’ll never tell, but she writes their names again and again, mirroring their wrists, then tears then up into a thousand pieces.”

“It’s just beautiful,” Balthazar says. “Too bad he’s sworn off love.”

***

“You’re getting almost adequate,” she says to him after the game. “By the time’s school’s over you might be good enough to be on the team.”

“It’s all that help you gave me,” he says.

“I kicked the ball a few times. How are you this old and no one has taught you how to properly kick?”

“I suppose you just spoke and it all clicked into place.”

“Are you feverish? Perhaps you’re you’re at that hallucinatory stage just before sudden yet painful death.”

“Shot through the heart, Beatrice.”

“If only,” she says, cocking a finger gun at him.

***

His dreams change. Not the ones at night, which are so intensely vivid he often wakes confused that he’s alone, but his daydreams. Sitting in physics, looking down the aisle towards her desk, picturing her throwing down her textbooks and kissing him instead.

***

“Here,” Balthazar says. He hands Ben a CD case, hand-decorated with cut out letters that say _Getting Over Him._

“Thanks,” Ben says. “But it’s not like Claudio was such a good friend anyway.” He was over it. Mostly.

“It’s for Hero,” Balthazar says. Ben opens it and peruses the track listing. Good stuff, most likely, stuff he was mostly not cool enough to know, plus a lot of banjo songs.

“I know you’re over at the Duke’s house every day.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“I would. Anyway, I’ve been working on this for weeks, trying to get the perfect mix together. I think it’ll help her.”

It doesn’t occur Ben until sixth period that Hero’s birthday party was only a week ago.

***

“Do you ever worry about that?” he asks Ursula, glancing at her wrist as she moves his head. Their lunch group had irrevocably broken up, with Hero out of school and Claudio and Pedro being shitty and Balthazar looking sad all the time. Ben couldn’t take the silence of lunch alone, so he spends most of them with Ursula, watching her working on homework, or occasionally playing with her camera. Today is one of those days, and she requires his modeling help to get the levels correct. Honestly, he doesn’t understand that sort of attitude; if she wants footage, she should just shoot and see what happens, not spend so much time adjusting the lighting and redoing every other bit.

“Are you asking about the soulmate thing?” she asks, chewing her lip as she glances at him through her camera.

“Yeah,” he says, trying to hold his head completely still. She adjusts him again.

“Your top priority is romance, right now in life?”

“No, but—“

“Because my biggest goal right now is go to university and get degrees in both psychology and film production—“

“That’s awfully practical of you.”

“I wouldn’t say that. I mean, my parents will be appeased, yes, but mostly I just want to have a leg up on understanding people. I can’t do documentaries if I don’t understand the human condition.”

“Love’s part of the human condition though.”

“Soulmates and love rarely keep company these days,” she said. “My sister didn’t marry her soulmate.”

“But she has one.”

“Her husband. Her wrist says otherwise, but it’s doesn’t matter because she’s in love.”

“But you—“

“Are seventeen,” she says firmly, adjusting his shoulders once more before stepping behind the camera.

***

“So how long have you two been hooking up?” Meg asks him, sneaking up behind him while he’s at his locker.

He drops his chemistry book, almost smashing his fingers in the process. He sticks one in his mouth, just to give himself a moment to think.

“You can’t lie to me,” she continues. “You two are eye-banging basically every second I’m looking at you.”

“We’re not hooking up. We’re not anything.”

She stares at him a moment before grabbing his hand and pulling him into an empty classroom.

“My locker’s still open,” he tells her as she locks them inside. She completely ignores both him and the fourth period bell.

“I thought it was cute to just let you two figure this out on your own, but. Life is short.” Meg sits on top of a desk, facing him in his chair, and he feels like he’s being lectured.

Although, it’s not like he has anyone else to talk to. “I told her how I felt.”

“And...?”

“She told me how _she_ felt.”

“ _And...._?”

“There’s this mutual liking thing. But she’s so worried about Hero, and revenge, and nothing has happened.”

She grins wickedly. “Nothing except she’s stopped wearing that ribbon and has started looking at you with total moon eyes. Which is not the Bea we all know and you love.”

“She told you I said that?”

“You just did.” Meg claps her hands together in delight.

Ben groans into his arms.

She slides from her desk, giving his shoulders a sharp shake. “Look, this stuff, this weird stuff is going to blow over soon—”

“You think?”

“Or it’ll blow up. I can’t predict the future. But when it’s done, and there’s, like, a fuckton of apologies from everyone who screwed me and Hero over, that’s when you’re going to _carpe your deim_ and you’re going to ask her out.”

***

He ends up kissing Bea in the park, away from the chaos, under the willow trees. She kisses slow and warm, and he's a little delirious from it.  "I know it's crazy cliche, but I think we should be officially be... official."

"Really? Now? The first rule of romance is to pick a calm day," she says, pulling on his belt loop. "No more of these weird traumatic moments."

He leans into her. "I have never once followed the rules."

"We're at my cousin's _funeral._ "

They both laugh, the absurdity of it all just too much.  

"I don't know about this  _being official_ business." She looks playful, but he can barely breath anyway. "Do you know how many people are going to know I changed my mind. I'll be a total hypocrite. Who does that?"

"I've done it."

"You have."

"Do you know how many people I have counselled to remain single? None of them listened, but I said it."

"Your life story, frankly."

"Nah," he says. "My life story, in the dramatic arc of my life, we start with the certain knowledge that romance is bad and relationships are worse. Then there's my blatant hypocrisy when I realized I was simply mad for you."

"That would make this the climax, then." She's already three steps ahead of him. 

"It's all downhill from here," he says, grabbing her hands.

"Pure rubbish," she says, her eyes sparkling. "It's only getting better from here."

***

The picnic’s hit a bit of a lull. Everyone’s forgiven, but no one has forgotten, and trying to heal their group with potato salad was probably a terrible idea.

"We shouldn't have cooked all these sandwiches," Ben whispers to Bea, and she giggles.

"Aren't you two precious." Hero has her phone out, and she urges them together. “Just one photo? I don’t have any pictures of the two of you.”

Bea covers her face. “That’s on purpose. Couple pictures are dumb.” 

Hero pulls down Bea’s hand. “It’s a picture. _Smile_!” She counts to three with her fingers, then snaps the picture. “That’s better.”

“Is it just me, or is she a little more... _less herself_ , these days?” he whispers to Bea, who nods.

Pedro, sitting a bit on the edges of the party with Claudio, cautiously comes over. “Yeah, if you’re going to do this, we want the whole thing. Like the pictures where the two of you are clearly just showing off.”

Hero looks at Pedro for a long moment, then hands him her phone. He smiles at her, but she just nods.

He looks at Ben. “Right. Well, let’s do this. Now look at each other... now look into the distance, both of you, over my left shoulder. Now hold your hands across your chests...”

Claudio comes over too. “What about the one where the two of them are lying in the grass in opposite directions, you know, looking up at the clouds?”

Balthazar tells them to go for an awkward fist-bump picture, and Meg demands an awkward _fisting_ picture and Ben gets a little light-headed.

Soon they’re all laughing, posing for fake couple pictures together. Ben fake-swoons for Pedro and Meg clutches Claud, and Balthazar serenades Ursula.

They even start kicking the football around.

By the time they’re packing up to go home, it’s closer to the old days than it’s been in a long time.

Ben checks facebook, and there’s Bea’s new profile picture: the two of them, lying in the grass, wrists draped across their foreheads, squinting up at the camera.

He smiles.


End file.
